Pasolini was born in Bolgona, Rome provided him with material for the novel that made him famous. The Ragazzi, published in Italy in 1955, is a series of fast-moving cinematic vignettes from the Roman underworld, and recounts the adventures of a group of street-wise teenagers. The street violence found fuller expression in Pasolinis films of the Greek myths Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1970), which starred Maria Callas. His solidarity with the Roman poor was at heart romantic, and in his great verse epic The Ashes of Gramsci (1952) he compares it to the youthful idealism of the poet Shelley, who is buried in the same cemetery in Rome as Antonio Gramsci, the grand theoretician of Italian Marxism. Perhaps it was inevitable that the 27-year-old Rimbaud lacking in genius (as Pasolini archly dubbed himself) should begin his Roman days among the despised and persecuted in a run-down flat in the Jewish ghetto. Hemmed in by the Tiber on one side, and the Largo Argentina on the other, the ghetto was (and still is) a world to itself. Catholic Italy, though, was changing fast, and Mamma Roma caught the new mood as the economic miracle of the early 1960s brought chewing gum, Coca-Cola, jeans and other trappings of American-style consumerism. Mamma Roma herself, played by Anna Magnani of Rome, Open City fame, is a streetwalker determined to do well by her teenage son Ettore. With enough money, she promises him, they can move into a respectable area. But Ettore only sinks deeper into the citys thieving underworld. The films final shot is of a series of bleak high-rise complexes near Cecafumo (an expanse of wasteland off Romes Via Tuscolana): the reward, Pasolini seems to be saying, for Romes new-found affluence. Pasolinis relationship with Rome was fraught with controversy. La Ricotta, his 35-minute episode in the collaborative film RoGoPag (1963), featured Orson Welles as an American director shooting a film about the passion of Christ. Over a tableau vivant inspired by baroque paintings of the Deposition, Welles cries out sacrilegiously: Get those crucified bastards out of here! A work of bawdy sensory realism, La Ricotta led to a suspended prison sentence for Pasolini on blasphemy charges. During the early 1970s, he wrote a series of savage newspaper polemics attacking drug abuse, mens long hair, offensive advertising and anything else that apparently contributed to the decline of his adored pre-industrial Italy. His documentary Love Meetings (1964) provided a wonderful glimpse of Catholic mores four years after Fellini captured the glitz of the nascent consumer Italy in La Dolce Vita; but now Italy was dying. Pasolinis most zealous attacks were targeted at TV, which, he believed, had replaced Italys dialects with a consumer Esperanto of garbled Americanisms and other linguistic imports. Disillusioned, he turned to the so-called third world for inspiration. The Cappadocia ofMedea, or the Yemen of The Arabian Nights (1974) are visually exquisite versions of Flauberts Salammbô – cinematic flowerings of European decadence. Towards the end of his life, Pasolini lived in the opulent Rome suburb of EUR. He bought a Maserati to add to his Alfa Romeo, and now dismissed the Roman poor as odiosi, even orribili; they had lost their innocence to the consumerist miracolo italiano and become greedy for material gain. For all the fabulous variety of his work, Pasolini could not escape his public image as a commentator on Italys troubled political life. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, his last and least appealing film, was released in 1975, shortly after his murder, and provides a violent essay on Italys Nazi-fascist past. The exuberance of his magnificent Roman films was gone; Salò is the work of a dispirited man. The masterworks remain, however, and these are well worth watching.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 11:38:31 +0000
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